We investigate the ramifications of quality of life concerns in the video game …

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Horror stories are constantly surfacing about the lengths game developers sometimes have to go in order to ship a game on time. The worst involve up to 85-hour work weeks—12 hours a day, seven days a week—which is more than double the century-old 40 hour per week standard. Extended periods of crunch can last up to a year, with sustained 60-hour weeks. This practice has earned a markedly less innocuous name than "crunch time." It's called "the death march."

In some cases it's nearly dehumanizing: the closure of All Points Bulletin developer Real Time Worlds in September of last year left more than 185 employees out of a job. They were welcomed to the end of a particularly long crunch period by pink slips rather than profit sharing and bonuses.

In an industry that is steadfastly focused on fun, it seems counter-intuitive that video gamers should be the ones who have to worry about the sagging quality of life of those who make the games. No kid should ever have to wonder if Santa Claus is cracking the whip too hard on his elves to make the Christmas Eve shipping deadline, but despite widespread outrage over revelations from ex-employees describing poor conditions, the status quo remains largely unchanged and unchallenged.

Bad Santa

On the surface it's simple. Studios push their employees harder to finish projects faster. Less time spent on development means less time employing a full team of artists, programmers, designers, testers etc.

This is one of the principle factors perpetuating the use of crunch by management. The vast majority of employees working in the development of video games are salaried employees and do not receive overtime for additional hours spent at the office. A recent poll of over 350 industry professionals taken by developer-focused website Develop, showed that 98 percent of those polled received no compensation for their overtime work.

Crunch isn't a tool used exclusively for cost saving measures. "When the team rallies behind the idea of an awesome new boss battle that wasn't on the original schedule, and goes the extra mile to make it super rad, that's not the same thing as forcing employees to stay all weekend," said Michael Wilford, CEO of Twisted Pixel games, the studio behind the Xbox Live Arcade titles 'Splosion Man and Comic Jumper.

EA was one of the first companies to be put in the spotlight for quality of life concerns after the infamous EA_spouse essay gained widespread exposure in 2004. The letter alleged, among other things, that employees were being moved to another crunch just as the previous crunch was ending.

Over time it has become part of the corporate culture of making video games. "To me, sometimes it's not even a deadline that propels someone to stay late or come in on the weekends," said Bruce Straley, lead designer on Uncharted 2. "Is it the company's management, or is it the individual? How much is it a 'cultural peer pressure'—the unspoken peer pressure that propels someone to stay longer just to hang out with their friends, or to avoid the feeling of guilt they place on themselves for leaving early?"

Straley was very clear that there are many reasons why a worker might stay after hours, but it was the "cultural peer pressure" comment that was echoed when we spoke with Dr. Shoshana Bennett, a psychologist who practices in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"I've heard from my clients that the competition for [game development] jobs is fierce," said Dr. Bennett. "My clients' husbands and boyfriends feel totally replaceable, and therefore are worried that if they don't perform, they'll lose their jobs. There is definitely a culture of fear that's cultivated in this industry."

This "culture of fear" isn't something overt, but rather is a subversive, almost jock-like attitude found throughout the industry. It's a sense that if you're not working overtime, you're not part of the team. In late 2008, Mike Capps, president of Epic Games (developers of Gears of War 3 and Bulletstorm) made controversial comments about crunch on an industry panel, going so far as to say that Epic wouldn't hire prospective employees unless they were willing to work upwards of 60 hours per week.

Why should you care?

You work hard at your job, and you don't always get to go home right when the clock strikes five, either. So why should you take time out of your day to sympathize with game developers? After all, they're adults. If they don't like their situation they can move on, right?

Well, the problem is that it's just not a very effective way to manage a project, and often it's the quality of the games that suffer. This is not a new revelation; as far back as 1909 studies have shown that the 40-hour work week actually provides more output over a long period of time than when employees work longer hours.

In an article published by the International Game Developers Association, 20 year development veteran Evan Robinson notes that studies show that regularly being awake for more than 21 hours impairs the mind as much as having a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08... that's also the point where it becomes illegal to drive a car.

"It's ironic," Robinson wrote. "Most software companies will fire an employee who routinely shows up drunk for work. But they don't think twice about... people who are impaired to the point of legal drunkenness due to lack of sleep. In fact, they will demand that these people work to the point of legal impairment as a condition of continued employment."

Punch-drunk love

What is worrisome is that some companies are perpetuating debunked and old fashioned ideas about the relationship between hours at work and productive output. The only demonstrable effect of which might be a lowered quality of life for employees, and ultimately a shorter career for some of the greatest designers in the world.

Many crunch-apologists will point to the fact that game developers can more easily work overtime because of their passion for their work. This is true, but the effect is minimal.

"Although loving your job and being stimulated with a particularly creative one might make it possible to work a few hours more than someone who isn't as enthusiastic," said Dr. Bennett "every person has his limit and will eventually burn out and lose effectiveness."

It's also important to remember that not all employees in the game industry are working on projects they are passionate about. It's pretty hard to imagine the entire staff behind the latest Dora the Explorer game being gung-ho about their work every day. Even those who are lucky enough to work on amazing AAA projects often aren't creatively stimulated. If you're the guy who makes different brick textures for the buildings in GTA4, or the guy who programs the way fire behaves when it spreads to different substances, that's not the same as being a top-level designer.

"There are many potential physical and mental health risks from overwork and inadequate sleep in general," said Dr. Bennett. "Focus and concentration will suffer—ironically, making the employee less productive—[accompanied by] lower immune system functioning and depression. You can literally get sick from too much work."

The mental health risks span beyond that. Psychologist Dr. Giles Burch, who also lectures on Human Resources at the University of Auckland Business School, told us that overworking can lead to strain on a marriage, and spending fewer hours at home can cause children to lose attachment to their parents.

A cost too high

This isn't an article meant to make readers recoil in horror at the realities of game development. If that were the case we'd have titled this, "The Gulags of Cyberia" and equated their struggle with mainland Chinese indentured sweatshop workers. But the simple fact is that game developers have to pay a heavy price to work in this business. Why should they?

There is great competition for jobs in game design these days, and many of the lucky few who snare jobs in the industry will be welcomed by unreasonable hours and forced to choose between work and relationships with family and friends.

"Extended crunch ages people in a way that they can't see on the front end," said Dustin Clingman, the chairman of the IGDA Quality of Life branch. "It robs them of years of creative potential."

Heroes Lost

Clingman's warning should be sobering even to those who are adamant that crunch is necessary to create great entertainment. In the past five years we've seen some of the industry's great designers retire at young ages compared to other creators in the film industry. The industry is being molded to fit the needs and abilities of young, energetic people and is incompatible with the needs of older, more experienced designers.

This is an issue our own Ben Kuchera has thought about at length. "I've been told that people who write about the business all want to be developers and make games," he told me. "It couldn't be any less true. We get to tour these studios and see how the people who make the games live. They seem to always be tired, the offices are dimly lit, and people are sleeping on cots." He points out that while many developers have benefits such as gyms and cafeterias onsite, that just drives home the idea that you're never supposed to leave.

Will Wright, Roberta Williams, and Toru Iwatani all retired before the age of 55. This is in stark contrast to some of the legendary directors of film, like Akira Kurosawa who directed and wrote screenplays until he was 85 and an injury physically kept him away. Steven Spielberg (64), Martin Scorsese (67), Francis Ford Coppola (71), Ridley Scott (73) and Clint Eastwood (nearly 81) all continue to write and direct films today, and they show now signs of stopping. The film industry is much better for it.

The message is clear. Either we move game development toward something more sustainable or it will be the gamers who miss out on what could be the greatest works of luminary designers.

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216 Reader Comments

I don't work in the games industry but I've worked on a number of projects where the only way to complete them on time has been to do more hours. This has in 100% of cases been a failure of management.

Personally the only way I could actually 10 hours on something is if I work from home. Or I'm doing something for myself and I'm actually interested, which is rarely the case at work.

I'd love to work in the games industry but for the fact its clearly an industry run by idiots.

You know developers aren't given enough time when Crysis 1 has a big issue with missing tires on vehicles, and then Crysis Warhead comes out with the same issue (and some less polished levels).

I remember the Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath expansion also came out with one or two surprising issues that were present in Command & Conquer 3 (but I can't remember what they were, at the moment).

Outside of MMORPG's, it seems that patches are rarely EVER used to finish things that are actually unfinished. (they just fix up crashes, and tiny, often unimportant things)

It seems the only companies who can *consistently* have good launches are those like Valve, Epic, and id, who have the muscle to tell publishers, "If you really want the privilege of releasing our games, you're going to sit and wait while we actually FINISH them."

Crunch is the (only) tool of poor management. And management has no incentive to try anything else because they don't have to pay developers overtime. Developers are treated like a cheap and inexhaustible resource. I promise you that if developers were required to be compensated fairly for their time, every person in a management position in the industry would be fired, because all they know how to do is mandate crunching. Video game management should be required to innovate to a similar degree that video game developers are. They are not earning their keep.

As long as crunches have no discernible effect on publishers, there will be no demonstrable incentive to change the practice.

As long as industry employees are more interested in keeping their jobs than they are in keeping an eight hour workday, there will be no incentive to change the practice.

As long as there are significantly more job seekers in the industry than there are positions, there will be no incentive for publishers to fear that poor conditions and developers will significantly affect release schedules.

It's obvious that the practice negatively affects the employees involved and their families in the short-term, and may affect the future availability of interesting and economically viable titles in the future.

What is less obvious, it would seem, to many developers and publishers, is what the alternatives are and what advantages they confer. That may be a worthwhile subject for discussion.

I would feel bad for them, but I'm at the end of 9 straight months of working 90+ hours a week. Tomorrow I go on vacation for three weeks...and then back to 90+ hours a week for at least four more months.

If you want to succeed, you work hours that are completely ludicrous. Until corporate power is checked, that's how it's going to be.

Unionize. They will need english developers at some point. They can't completely outsource everything and if all gamedevs unionized and you could keep people from crossing the line then you would be set.

I'd wait 6+ mo for BF3 and know that the people at Dice didn't miss their kids' birthdays for this game.

Ages ago I worked in the game industry and I came away with these thoughts:

First, almost everyone underestimates how long a project will take anyway. If you tell the money people 2 years, you have 2 years. There is some weird idea that if you tell your investment track a tight timeframe to get the funds then ask for more time later you'll get it - which is often not the case.

Second, for the love of god - stop play testing other people's games. Work is work, and although general game design is fun, the implementation is hard. In almost every single game studio I worked for, and I got around as a freelance contractor - specifically to help make up for lost time, I noticed far too many people playing some other game for hours on end. At some point that time has to be made back up.

The third is that programming is far less rewarding and the lack of praise can result in disgruntled coders. A lot of programmers are already somewhat anti-social people. I know that is a bad generalization, but the profession does attract a certain type. The art staff builds visuals that anyone can come along and not only see progress, but can get excited about lavishing praise. Conversely, a programmer might spend weeks building a beautiful set of classes that will make further developement so much better - however there is likely nothing to show visually the beauty to what has been done. I think that is hard.

If you don't want to have "crunch" time, you have to run a tight production house that manages to be fun to work in while remaining productive. Instead of working light for a couple weeks then crunching for a milestone, then light, then crunch, etc... the leaders need to keep everyone paced better. Pacing your team at 10+ hour days isn't smart either, if your project looks like that its time to talk to the producers and get more budget for manpower or time, or reduce the scope of the project.

Good leadership, realistic expectations, attentive praise... but those are key ingredients in any successful business.

What is less obvious, it would seem, to many developers and publishers, is what the alternatives are and what advantages they confer. That may be a worthwhile subject for discussion.

The alternatives are really quite simple:

1: Plan ahead. Making a game takes time. Set a deadline that is realistic to the game being designed. And vice-versa: do not design a game that will take 3 years to make if you only have 2 years to make a game.

2: Hire experienced developers. Grabbing any bum off the streets will not get you the best productivity for your dollars. Experienced developers know how long it will take to make a game, so they will be more likely to set a realistic deadline and actually meet it.

3: Look at how movies are made. Movies are made in 3 phases: pre-production, actual on-set shooting, and post-production. Everything is based around making the shooting time as small as possible. Once the schedule is set in pre-production, it does not change outside of acts of God.

Games need a solid pre-production phase where designers experiment with the gameplay and actually figure out how to make the game. Once they know that, then they can know how long it will take to make it at a reasonable level of quality.

4: Remove all obstacles in the developer's way. This includes upper-management adding BS requirements in the middle of a project. But it also means streamlining development so that game designers can rapidly test their gameplay without having to waste time constantly reloading the game. This means having proper tools for the artists to be able to most effectively do their jobs. And so forth.

5: Make game design that is, to some degree, modular. If you fall behind, you can cut areas/features/etc.

6: Have a real post-mortem. One where you can effectively investigate why a project fell behind. One that meticulously goes through the schedule and finds out where things went well and what processes could be smoothed out. This also means that, when making the next game, you have clear goals to improve on.

In short: good project management.

Quote:

Unionize. They will need english developers at some point. They can't completely outsource everything and if all gamedevs unionized and you could keep people from crossing the line then you would be set.

Sadly, there will always be non-union workers available, even in the US. All they have to do is hire recent graduates looking for a glamorous job in the field of videogame development. That's pretty much what game developers do anyway.

+1 for the Visual Effects Industry! It's the exact same conditions... constant anxiety over layoffs or what to do when the gig ends or how many more hours before you can rest. It's ridiculous! Burn-out happens very quickly when you feel like you have a gun to your head. And it's sad, really. You get into the business because it's something you love. Eventually it becomes something you hate.

It's also good project management practice not to over-extend your employees. There are countless papers written on the effect of over-worked employees writing buggier code, which then has to be fixed later when time is truly of the essence.

While it is true that over-extending employees can lead to increased productivity over the short term (the point of diminishing returns is about 2 weeks, after which there is a "recovery period" of decreased productivity at baseline hours) project managers and development leads know this is bad practice and have known it is bad practice for at least 25 years. It's well documented, and not just in the gaming segment. Yet it still happens because people are notoriously bad at judging their own fatigue.

Ages ago I worked in the game industry and I came away with these thoughts:

First, almost everyone underestimates how long a project will take anyway. If you tell the money people 2 years, you have 2 years. There is some weird idea that if you tell your investment track a tight timeframe to get the funds then ask for more time later you'll get it - which is often not the case.

This problem really irks me, because it is a solved problem at real development houses outside the gaming industry. Estimation isn't rocket science, but you have to do a little more work than just pull some numbers out your ass. I think the constant churn is part of the problem here; none of your people with the quantitative analysis skills and the experience to do it right stick around for more than 1 or 2 projects. Doesn't help that they pay peanuts compared to "industry" (all the while these games consistently rake in more than very, very large movies.)

I'm a software developer with about 10 years experience and Computer Engineer by training.

This problem exists to a lesser degree, in all of software projects.

Your first suggestion is at the root of the problem. The business depends and need dates that can be committed to. Software plans involve risk and unknowns. Most software engineers don't know how to determine how much work they overlooked. Yes, it's the unknown unknowns that get you. Even if you plan the known unknowns, you're estimates are ranges of dates, but everyone talks about estimates in points. The uncertainty get's lost and the discussion rises up the management chain.

I know plenty of otherwise very talented software engineers that can't do your second suggestion. They both lack the training and practice. If it was covered it school, it was one lecture and most of the lecture is theory and can't be practically applied.

Your third suggestion sounds very good, except there is a lot of uncertainty in the schedule.

Your forth suggestion is two things. Part is feature work and the first problem applies going it.

Modular designs sound nice, but the real problem is getting rid of the parts that you need to cut before you've payed for them. You also have to avoid the sunk cost fallacy.

Postmortems are only good if the team stays intact and people trust each other and management to really speak their mind. Most of the developers understand what went wrong, but not why.

Well one could argue that the difference between the two industries (film and software) is that one is highly unionized and the other is not. Film has "crunches" as well, but almost everyone is well rewarded for it.

There is a lost culture in long and tedious hours called "Fun and Pranks" it was The Woz as one of the many shaman of the first hours that said U need to have that but it changed through the years I don't see that hidden culture in any articles or books for developing team work,

Maybe I'm old fashioned but fun and pranks is what keeps team I'm in focused interested and sharp.

(something else for lolz) I see "literate programming" in this sentence.

overworking can lead to strain on a marriage, and spending fewer hours at home can cause children to lose attachment to their parents.

I've noticed this about the gaming industry, and I've done what I can in my studio's modus operandi to make sure that short of the few weeks before the dedicated release date (which is set when we feel like it) no one is overworked and we're all getting a very reasonable amount of relaxation in. Making games should be fun, even if it is stressful.

+1 for the Visual Effects Industry! It's the exact same conditions... constant anxiety over layoffs or what to do when the gig ends or how many more hours before you can rest. It's ridiculous! Burn-out happens very quickly when you feel like you have a gun to your head. And it's sad, really. You get into the business because it's something you love. Eventually it becomes something you hate.

another +1 for the vfx industry. a friend who transferred to canada to work (canadian government is offering BIG incentives for companies to open shop there), put in several consecutive 140(!)hr weeks (that's 4hrs/day personal time!?) to complete the vfx for marvel's latest blockbuster. Execs and investors want to spend 10million and make 100 million. in order to get those returns, much of the lower-tier work is being sent overseas, while the remaining work goes to the lowest domestic bidder, whose employees end up being the ones who have to somehow reconcile the equation of insane-amount-of-work in not-enough-time. think twice about choosing one of these professions if you place a high value on time spent outside of your job.

Software plans involve risk and unknowns. Most software engineers don't know how to determine how much work they overlooked. Yes, it's the unknown unknowns that get you. Even if you plan the known unknowns, you're estimates are ranges of dates, but everyone talks about estimates in points. The uncertainty get's lost and the discussion rises up the management chain.

As much as I hate "Agile", the idea of small sprints is something I practice individually. While I know what my next project are, I only do detailed work plans 2 weeks ahead, because that is all I can reliably plan for. Period. And usually the first day of each week is spent fleshing out the unknows in small test cases and prototypes. So I get an early warning if something isn't going to work the way I think it will. If by Tuesday at lunch I'm still struggling then it's a huge red flag - something isn't going right and I need help or a different strategy to solve this problem.

Then again I only write LOB software for internal use. So I don't really have many hard deadlines.

The comparison with cinema is interesting. I think one of the problem is that the video game industry and the movie industry are totally at the opposite in term of who get the "spotlight" when a good game come out. In movies, the director and actors get the spotlight, the producers and the studio clearly don't get a lot of credit. In fact nobody care about the studio if they like the directors and the actors.

In the videogame industry its totally the opposite. Almost nobody know who is the Game Designer of their favorite game (except if its "Sid Meyer's Civilization" or "Madden NFL 2012 ... :P" ), but we all know the publisher and sometime the studio (who normally is owned by the publisher anyway). Almost nobody knows that the next Modern Warfare is developped by almost nobody from the first game.

So basically, even veteran game designer don't have a lot of power, their name alone just won't sell (even if there is some exception). So who care's if they can't work 90 hours a week anymore, the studio will just hire someone younger.

I think this difference is in part due to the different nature of cinema and games. Even if games can be art, "a creative proposition", they don't necessarily have to. A game can be just a technical evolution of the same basic concept and be objectively great as a game. I think for example that Battlefield 3 will be a great game even if basically it will be Battlefield 2 with more features and more technological advancement. Nothing will be totally new, yet everything will just be more polished and so it will be a great "game".

Of course, a game can be great and be creative. Team Fortress 2 is a good example of a classic concept executed in a totally unique and creative fashion. Team Fortress 2 is a piece of art, Battlefield 3 is not, but both remain great games.

The same thing is not exactly true for cinema. Even the biggest blockbuster need some kind of creative inspiration behind it to really be a hit. The Dark Knight was a blockbuster with a clear creative inspiration behind it, it made record profit. But I can't think of any movie that people consider a "great" movie that didn't have some kind of clear creative inspiration behind it. Yes a lot of peoples went to see Transformers 2, but nobody think years after that it was objectively a great movie.

To put it another way, game critics praised Team Fortress 2 and praised Battlefield 2 (and they will probably praise the 3). Movie critics praised the Dark Knight, but won't praise any movie that don't have some kind of artistic qualities.

The problem with suggesting unions is that the videogames industry is comparatively smaller than many other industries. It's not the same as others, in that you can't rise up against your employer for mismanagement and maltreatment, and then find another job within a couple of weeks if need be. Getting a job in the games industry is extremely difficult, often requiring huge amounts of luck, experience far beyond pretty much any other job despite no professional opportunities to gain it, and there are far, far more people searching for jobs than there are jobs to go around - not to mention that if you do get an offer, chances are you'll have to move to a new city or even country to make good on it. Even when you do have professional experience, getting a job is hardly a guarantee - I've heard dozens of stories from developers with as much as 5-10 years working professionally, who send out 300 applications to specific job postings and never get so much as a refusal e-mail back. Sure, you can try to unionise, but the risk of losing your job is far more significant than in nearly any other field, and employers know it. Until the industry begins to develop and real standards are gradually agreed upon (trade organisations like the IGDA help here), there's little else that can be done except put up with it.

As someone who wants to get into the games industry at some point, it's frustrating as hell because I know I have the talent to go ahead with it, but I'm well aware that just about any job I get will result in my becoming burned out (the games industry has one of the highest turnover rates, if not the highest, of any professional field), having to move between states/provinces/countries as often as every few months because layoffs are so common, and it might end up putting incredible amounts of stress on my personal relationships as well. It pains me, because even at 22, I'm unsure if I'm wasting my time and my potential early job experience/portfolio development on something that is ultimately going to be worthless; while I'm sure all industries suffer from these sorts of problems to some degree, the videogames industry is up there among the worst when it comes to management and employee treatment, and there is no excuse at this point for such a large industry to have such low standards.

It pains me, because even at 22, I'm unsure if I'm wasting my time and my potential early job experience/portfolio development on something that is ultimately going to be worthless; while I'm sure all industries suffer from these sorts of problems to some degree, the videogames industry is up there among the worst when it comes to management and employee treatment, and there is no excuse at this point for such a large industry to have such low standards.

I know people in the gaming industry, just don't do it. If you love games, you better off playing them and working on something else.

Having worked at many developers and owned one, this is something I think about quite a bit.

Alfonse wrote:

1: Plan ahead. Making a game takes time. Set a deadline that is realistic to the game being designed. And vice-versa: do not design a game that will take 3 years to make if you only have 2 years to make a game.

Sadly, this is not so easy. Estelius (above) said estimation wasn't rocket science; not entirely sure, but in mainstream software development it's more of a solved problem. In videogame development, less so for multiple reasons:-publishers - or less enlightened ones - feel free to add and remove features at any time because, hey, they are paying-look and feel tasks like control system, effects, AI often end up with multiple passes and are notoriously hard to get right never mind schedule right. I've seen things take 10x the time originally estimated, and still work out poorly (and done by strong developers)-working with an in-development engine or toolchain, or new and unfamiliar hardware, or a new SDK is often a reality in game development, and those things can cause massive schedule variance

Alfonse wrote:

2: Hire experienced developers. Grabbing any bum off the streets will not get you the best productivity for your dollars.

Yep. The downside is those experienced developers will cost you a lot of money, and if that expensive team slips for factors outside their control, it will cost you dear.

Alfonse wrote:

3: Look at how movies are made. Movies are made in 3 phases: pre-production, actual on-set shooting, and post-production. Everything is based around making the shooting time as small as possible. Once the schedule is set in pre-production, it does not change outside of acts of God.

One major difference is that movies more or less work with a fixed technology set, where game developers don't, as above. But yes, if you could get everyone to work this way, it would help. Some do work like this, but not all.

Alfonse wrote:

4: Remove all obstacles in the developer's way. This includes upper-management adding BS requirements in the middle of a project.

The upper management BS is often in the publisher - a separate company - not the developer, and the publisher usually holds the purse strings. So while the idea to add split screen 3 months from ship might be BS, it came from the VP of external development who just heard a game in the same genre as yours releasing at the same time has split screen, so hey, get to it. In that situation as a developer your realistic choice is refusal and legal recourse to your contract - always a good way to make sure the publisher is happy with you and would like to work with you again - or trying to get it done.

Alfonse wrote:

5: Make game design that is, to some degree, modular. If you fall behind, you can cut areas/features/etc.

That does work. Many shipped games are missing all kinds of fascinating half done bits and pieces or indeed whole levels, bosses, etc that were cut for schedule reasons.

Alfonse wrote:

In short: good project management.

Developers are guilty of some terrible management practices, but it's not as simple as pointing at the developer alone and saying 'you guys can't manage'. I have personal experience of publishers driving a project in circles then deciding it had cost too much and taken too long, and just canning it.

On unionisation - some developers and publishers are actively anti-union. And if as a developer's management you need to know you can get some crunch out of your team to get the game finished, you will be extremely nervous about unionisation - whether you intend to work your teams that hard, or are just thinking of that as a worst case backstop. I would think publishers would be highly nervous of a unionised developer, too. Some publishers regard the ability to crunch as a good attribute for a developer. I guess it's that ingrained.

Some studios have experimented with overtime. The problem is there's a danger you are tying your salary outlay to factors outside your control (as above) - and that's a bad idea for a small developer. Sad but true.

As long as crunches have no discernible effect on publishers, there will be no demonstrable incentive to change the practice.

As long as industry employees are more interested in keeping their jobs than they are in keeping an eight hour workday, there will be no incentive to change the practice.

As long as there are significantly more job seekers in the industry than there are positions, there will be no incentive for publishers to fear that poor conditions and developers will significantly affect release schedules.

It's obvious that the practice negatively affects the employees involved and their families in the short-term, and may affect the future availability of interesting and economically viable titles in the future.

What is less obvious, it would seem, to many developers and publishers, is what the alternatives are and what advantages they confer. That may be a worthwhile subject for discussion.

This. I want to read articles about success stories. I want to read about the team that speaks up against the marketing bots. About the team that is able to say, "Hey, the game you want us to make is going to take another year" and then see the team get that time and go on to ship an amazing title, with minimal outside interference. I want to read about big projects, with big money behind them, done right.

I want this because it doesn't happen enough and because we're past the point of simply admitting that crunch time is a problem. ea_spouse was six years ago already! Shouldn't we be on step 3 or 4 of our 12 step program by now?

The last game I worked on was a year-long death march. Everyone on the project knew it was bad. Heck, everyone at our (large) studio knew it was bad. Unfortunately we had a ship date that was set in stone for financial and marketing reasons and we had no options other than give up or crunch. We even managed to get more time and it was still madness.

We had a few key positions on the team staffed with incompetent fools. That alone would've been ok though, because they could've been bypassed easily enough. We had most of our senior leadership -- the guys that had pitched our crazy project in the first place -- leave halfway through the project. Their replacements inherited a mess but were too concerned about their own jobs to say anything serious to the higher-ups about it.

Persistent design churn, requests for demos from producers simply to justify to their superiors that they deserved to keep their jobs, and constant last-minute demands were the order of the day. My favorite was finding out Friday noon that first party reps were going to be visiting on Monday-oh-and-can-you-get-this-new-feature-you-mentioned-the-other-day-ready-by-then-and-set-up-a-demo-at-your-desk-k-thanks. That was a fun couple days.

All this while trying to wrangle multiple platforms and new hardware and dealing with outsourcing.

The project finally finished. Then the team started working on DLC. The first pack was finished with far less pain, thankfully. As it was being submitted to first party, we suddenly found out that it couldn't be released because the DLC sponsor thought we'd be giving it away when our company wanted to sell it. Oops.

By now the sales figures had started to roll in. They were well below projections. It wasn't long after that that the layoffs started. Of the 70+ people once on the team, there are maybe 5 or 6 of us left. The franchise was completely canceled and the remaining staff re-assigned.

Just add the fact that a project done using crunch almost always ends with burned teams, which means either high turnover, or worse, people leaving games industry. If the company survives the turnover (building game dev teams that work great is hell), the codebase will most likely be a mess, making next games even harder to produce as your publisher will asume you have a working engine.

i'd been working the last 5 years for a major software company. Of course you had deadlines and of course you had to work long hours, from time to time, but all in all it seemed to me that the difference was made by the planning skills of low and mid management.

Have the unkuck of a boss who's poor at estimating costs and you'll be spending nights and weekends chasing completrly artificial deadlnes (say phase 2 of milestone 5 must be finished bu next tue at 1035am).

i am a junior doctor. 75+ hour work week is the bare minimum and what we basically get paid for. however i almost always end up doing a 85+ hour work week (twice a week having to do 32+ hour shifts).

we don't get paid for the overtime, its expected of us. those who leave on time are looked down upon and get told off by our seniors.

the pay is laughably lousy, as the pay only improve at the higher ranks "something like after 10+ years of experience".

its a stifling environment. you get little in the way of recognition and appreciation. if you are a hard worker, you get abused for it and end up having more work dumped on you.

my situation only mildly improved after i casually mentioned that i was thinking of applying to different hospital with a better training program. they've been trying to convince me to stay. am not sure i can be bothered. i don't think the situation elsewhere is much better but am seriously feeling burned out.

Conversely, a programmer might spend weeks building a beautiful set of classes that will make further developement so much better - however there is likely nothing to show visually the beauty to what has been done. I think that is hard.

One of the common problems between management and any software development team is that it is very difficult to appreciate the work a developer has done. A dev can spend weeks writing a fast scheduling algorithm which takes into account resource usage, convenience, etc, but management or customer will always be impressed because the button to start it is pink (or something equally trivial).

It's not just about software though. Anything that's hard to measure becomes a candidate for bad decisions: the impact of long hours, the impact of resource churn, the impact of investment in a decent class library... If a manager doesn't appreciate the ROI of investing in these things then they won't invest.

Everything being discussed here is valid and the legacy of crunch time is one the industry should (and in a lot of cases has) be working to change.

However, this article implies it is something that occurs across the games industry in general rather than something that happens in certain AAA studios. What about all the other small developers, of which there are a lot more??

These newer studios don't generally act like that and it is a bit frustrating that this article doesn't make that distinction because it gives an inaccurate impression of the industry. Also, a lot of bigger studios don't do that either, talk to people from Blitz or Jagex (2 of the UKs biggest devs) and you will hear a a different story.

Well one could argue that the difference between the two industries (film and software) is that one is highly unionized and the other is not. Film has "crunches" as well, but almost everyone is well rewarded for it.

Post production (VFX) in film is a very similar model to the game industry. Long hours are expected, overtime is often unpaid and unions don't exist. See this recent post from the VES:

This article is totally in line with what I heard from friends working in the industry.

As some other posters have mentioned, if bad planning can often be blamed, what I’ve heard the most, are stories concerning the publisher’s whims. They can be very attached to trends of all kind depending on the public the game is aimed at. Therefore, they will, without a second though, change important game features or design choices with absolutely no warning and no notion of what that will entail in terms of work for the development teams. I’ve heard stories along those lines of months of development time 100% wasted just because the publisher changed his mind about a game feature. Which begs for the real question, why is management so bad in that industry?

As for solutions, well, if that was happening in Europe, I’d tell these programmers to sue their employers before the European court of justice for civil right violations. They would probably have a good chance to see them heavily condemned. Barring that, well, unions do seem to be the way to go. It certainly worked for the movie industry.

I think Valve is a good example of a studio that does this kind of thing well. From "The Final Hours of Portal 2", I got the sense that Valve doesn't mind taking the time to make a creative, highly polished game and even taking months of time solely devoted to creating new ideas. Granted, not every developer can do exactly what Valve does, but they can learn a lot from what Valve does.